Memória espacial em macacos-prego (Cebus apella) e humanos

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

Spatial memory is essential to the survival of animal species, because of its relation with the animals capacity to acquire and recall information on the interaction with the enviroment. It is believed, that the aptitude to this memory would occur on post-natal period, coinciding with the functional maturation of hippocampus. From an evolutionary point of view, the behavioral repertory that enables each species to respond to environment is strongly influenced by emotions. Several species have been used for spatial memory research. However, on primates, the ability to solve problems using this memory has been studied on relatively few species. Thus, the aims of this study are to investigate: 1) the spatial recognition memory in young and adults captive capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), of the University of Brasilia Primate Center; 2) if the spatial memory on that subjects would be affected by the kind of stimulus used (geometric or co-especific); 3) to verify the protocol adequacy to the spatial memory research. There were used 11 monkeys, five male and six female (young (n=3) and adult (n=8)) on a spatial-delayed recognition span task (SDRST), on an automatic test that required from the subjects the identification of the position of a new stimulus gradually presented on a increasing configuration of eight identical stimuli. Twenty one human voluntaries, 11 men and 10 women (X= 22,52 + 2,26 years), were also submitted to the same monkeys protocol. Three variations of the initial protocol were used with monkeys because of their poor performance on the test. The results indicated that: 1) monkeys showed a random performance on the SDRST test; 2) there were no diferences on the test SDRST performance between young and old monkeys 3) the performance exhibited by capuchin monkeys and humans on the test SDRST was not affected by the kind of stimulus used on the test; 4) the use of the initial protocol to evaluate spatial memory allowed the task learning in humans, but not in monkeys. These results suggested that methodological aspects could have possibly contributed to the poor performance of the animals on the spatial memory task.

ASSUNTO(S)

capuchin monkeys interaction memory-emotion memória de reconhecimento espacial ontogênese da memória spatial recognition memory macaco-prego ontogenesis of the memory interação memória-emoção comportamento animal

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

Documentos Relacionados